THE NEW ATHEISM

What you need to understand about NEW ATHEISM you can get to understand by reading the third essay of Nietzsche's GENEALOGY OF MORALS.  That is to say that the NEW ATHEISTS are extreme Christians.  

You need to understand about the historical trajectory of the ASCETIC IDEAL and how that reaches its full blossom in NEW ATHEISM.   Although the HISTORICAL hothouse of it is/was Christianity.

See
http://home.sandiego.edu/~janderso/360/genealogy3.htm

and the second last aphorism, 27:

“Christian morality itself, the increasingly strict understanding of the idea of truthfulness, the subtlety of the father confessor of the Christian conscience, transposed and sublimated into scientific conscience, into intellectual cleanliness at any price. To look at nature as if it were a proof of the goodness and care of a god, to interpret history in such a way as to honour divine reason, as a constant testament to a moral world order and moral intentions, to interpret one’s own experiences, as devout men have interpreted them for long enough, as if everything was divine providence, everything was a sign, everything was thought out and sent for the salvation of the soul out of love—now that’s over and done with. That has conscience against it. Among more sensitive consciences that counts as something indecent, dishonest, as lying, feminism, weakness, cowardice. With this rigour, if with anything, we are good Europeans and heirs to Europe’s longest and bravest overcoming of the self. All great things destroy themselves by an act of self-cancellation. That’s what the law of life wills, that law of the necessary “self-overcoming” in the essence of life—eventually the call always goes out to the lawmaker himself, “patere legem, quam ipse tulisti” [submit to the law which you yourself have established]. That’s the way Christianity was destroyed as dogma by its own morality; that’s the way Christendom as morality must now also be destroyed. ....After Christian truthfulness has come to a series of conclusions, it will draw its strongest conclusion, its conclusion against itself.